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An incident triggered the escalation chain rule, but why didn't it get escalated as expected?

Environment:

Oracle B2C Service, Business Rules

Issue:

An incident triggered the escalation chain rule which is configured to revalidate. The incident, however, was not escalated. Why didn't the record get escalated?

Resolution:

When the "Revalidate" checkbox is enabled in a rule, all rule conditions will be revalidated whenever the incident is edited again, before the dbstatus -r utility runs to set the escalation level on that record. Note, however, that the revalidate action is not limited to the rule conditions of the escalation rule.

There could be several reasons why the incident will not escalate if the "Revalidate" feature is enabled. 

• The conditions in the escalation rule should still be met during subsequent incident edits (but before the escalation is set).
  • Note that saving a record without changing anything does not trigger a new rule run, so the conditions will not be re-evaluated in this case.
  • If one of the conditions is related to a different object (for example, a contact), and that record is changed between the time the escalation rule is triggered and the time the escalation should be set, but the incident is not edited again after this change, the revalidation will not happen and the incident will be escalated regardless if the conditions are still met or not. 
• If the incident has been edited since the escalation rule was hit, even if conditions are still met, ensure that the escalation rule was also hit during the last rule run. It is possible that the escalation rule was added in a function that is no longer hit, or the incident has been moved previously to a different state. 
  • For this reason, it is considered a best practice that each escalation function should be called only by rule(s) in a state. Those rules should not have any IF conditions which might not pass the revalidation check. Ideally, the rule which calls the escalation function should have no IF conditions that need to be revalidated. Such IF conditions should be within the escalation rule in the function.
• If the Escalate action is Relative to a specific incident field, ensure that the field was set accordingly. For example, if the rule is set to escalate the incident following the Incidents > Date Last Responded date, if there never is a response on the incident, the escalation will never be set.
• If you are using multiple escalation rules based on the Previous Escalation Level field, keep in mind the previous escalation level may have been different at the time of the last rule run. See Previous Fields in Conditions documentation page. 

Moreover, regardless if the Revalidate box is checked, if the incident's status has been changed to a Solved type before the dbstatus -r utility ran to escalate the incident, the incident will not be escalated. 

For more information on the revalidate option, refer to Answer ID 2015: Using Response Interval, Revalidate, and Recalculate boxes with rulesAnswer ID 2015: Using Response Interval, Revalidate, and Recalculate boxes with rules